Seven hundred ninety-nine wins ago - give or take a few years spent as a graduate assistant basketball coach - Bob Huggins’ first inclination was to become a doctor, although he didn’t really know much about the profession and had hardly ever visited one while growing up the Philadelphia suburbs - the New Philadelphia, Ohio suburbs.
“I didn’t know there were different kinds,” he said the other day before practice. “I grew up in a town of 500 people, two stoplights and nine bars.
“But we had a doctor.”
He was the type of small-town family doctor that you could bang on his door late at night and he would let you in, or, after taking your blood pressure, you could bum a cigarette off him if you smoked.